Sunday 26th July
Twelve weeks ago I started writing about tracking data, perfectionism, flat weeks, and then shame. Quiet, familiar stories we tell ourselves when something feels a bit off.
Over these past 12 weeks, each letter circled a common pattern, but with a focus on a different mechanism running underneath.
A feeling arrives: flat, anxious, uncertain, low. And almost before we've registered it as a feeling or a state, it's already become a doctoral level formulation. A difficult meeting isn't only a difficult meeting; it's evidence that you're slipping. An anxious morning isn't only an anxious morning; it's proof you've gone backwards. A flat week isn't simply a flat week; it's the sense that you've lost yourself.
The feeling doesn't stay a feeling. It recruits a narrator, a forecaster. And within moments, you're no longer responding to what you felt, you're responding to what you've just decided it means about now, and about your future. This is the load-bearing wall the other twelve letters were built around.
The Moving Bar was about what success had come to mean: a new baseline.
Second Wave Shame was the second move: a feeling or a conclusion that a difficult experience means there is something inherently wrong with you.
And the Flat Week with broken sleep, the one that inspired this whole run of letters, became difficult the moment it started to sound like a verdict requiring total overhaul.
I think it’s important to emphasise that these ideas aren’t simply to minimise the very real and felt ways that a tough few weeks or months land. Additionally, people endure painful and stressful experiences like relationships ending, quiet months in business, and injured or unwell bodies.
But there's a difference between that and what usually follows. Not just “this hurts”, but “this shouldn't be happening”, “it’s all my fault”. Not just “I feel behind”, but “this proves nothing I've learnt has lasted”. The first is simply what it costs to be alive, to care, and to pay attention. The second is a story about what it means, and it's these meanings that we may (prematurely) risk organising our life around.
If you've read this far, you're probably the kind of person for whom that distinction is genuinely useful (and also genuinely hard to apply). Like I noted in my letter two weeks ago; our self-beliefs and stories carry huge function as well. And the people I tend to work with (and the people I suspect are reading this), are actually not people who often avoid their feelings. They’re people who quickly investigate them, and decide, often immediately, what they mean and what the prescription should be.
Sometimes the more sophisticated move isn't finding the answer. It’s re-organising the responding sequence (e.g., pausing before interpreting, not deciding what something means on purpose) and slowing our conclusions down.
In treatment for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, we love to say to people searching for proof or certainty “what would it be like to let that remain unresolved?”. “Are you willing to let that remain open for now?”
I'm not going to end this series with a new idea or a tool… a restraint I’m trying to hone in my own clinical practice. So in spirit of modelling good process, I’ll leave this open…
These letters weren’t trying to end perfectionism, or self-doubt, or shame, or the weeks that feel a little boring. No psychologist gets to promise you that, and I'd be suspicious of one who tried. But perhaps you'll catch the moment a feeling reaches for a familiar story too quickly.
Psychological flexibility, in my experience, rarely looks like the dramatic shift people expect. It isn't feeling differently. It's becoming slightly slower to build a life around a feeling that was only ever passing through.
If these letters have done anything over twelve weeks, I hope it's that. Not fewer difficult moments, just a little more room before you decide what they mean.
As always, hold it lightly.
Shoni
Dr Shoni Marshall-Edwards
Clinical Psychologist · AHPRA PSY0004030165
Alba Psychology · Online · Australia and New Zealand